NEW DELHI: Video conferencing app Zoom has released an official statement responding to the Supreme Court notice to the union government on a plea that calls for banning Zoom in India for official and personal usage.

“Zoom is reported to have a bug that can be abused intentionally to leak information of users to third parties. The app has falsely claimed calls are end-to-end encrypted when they are not,” the plea said, as per a report by news agency PTI.

The report added that the plea claimed that Zoom had also apologised publicly for “mistakenly routing traffic through China” where internet is heavily monitored by the government.

In response to this, a Zoom spokesperson in an official statement said, “Zoom takes user privacy, security, and trust extremely seriously. We have been focused on enhancing our commitment to security and privacy under our 90-day plan announced April 1st, and have made significant progress.

Zoom is an American company listed on Nasdaq and for close to a decade we have been helping some of the world’s largest financial services companies, leading telecommunications providers, government agencies, universities and others stay connected in a safe and secure manner. Many of these entities have done exhaustive security reviews of our user, network and data center layers and confidently selected Zoom for complete deployment, and we actively engage with them[, as we are with the Indian Central Government,] to provide them with any information they need to make informed decisions.”

In April, the Cyber Coordination Centre (CyCord) under the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had released a detailed advisory on use of the Zoom video-calling app. The advisory clarified that the Zoom platform should not be used by government officials for official purposes as it is not safe. India’s Cyber Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) had also issued multiple warnings previously on the use of Zoom app for video conferencing. The latest CyCord advisory by MHA have also issued guidelines for safe usage of Zoom by private individuals for unofficial purposes only.